Perhaps they had their own purpose for her. Well, she didn’t care about that. For now, it was enough that she still breathed.
She called with the contact rumble: "Foxeye! Croptail! Can you hear me? It’s Silverhair. Foxeye, call if you hear me…"
She heard the thin trumpeting of a frightened calf — a trumpeting that was cut off abruptly.
Her heart hammered. At least one of them was still alive, then.
She moved forward, gliding deeper into the complex of buildings and pipes and smoking pillars. The Lost formed up behind her, their thunder-sticks never far below their shoulders, and they followed her like a gaggle of ugly calves. She called as she walked, and liquid mammoth rumbles echoed from the metal walls of this City of the Lost, and the massive, natural grace of her gait contrasted with the angular ugliness of the place.
She walked right through the City, to its far side. Here she could see open tundra, stretching away. There were more buildings here, but their character was different. These were much rougher structures, some of them so flimsy they looked ready to fall down. Thin smoke snaked up to the gray sky, bearing the sour smell of burned meat. The ground here was churned-up, lifeless mud.
There were many Lost here, some of them emerging from the crude buildings to stare at her, some running away in fear.
And there, in a clearing at the center of this cluster of buildings, were the mammoths. She counted quickly — Foxeye and Croptail and Sunfire — all of them alive, if miserable and bedraggled. Her heart hammered, and she longed to rush forward to her Family. But she forced herself to be still, to observe, to think.
The mammoths were held in two cages: one for Foxeye alone, the other for the two calves. When the calves saw Silverhair approach, Croptail set up an excited squealing. "Silverhair!"
The cages, crudely constructed, were too small to allow the mammoths to move, even to turn around. The cages had thick ropes trailing from their roofs. Silverhair saw how distressed the calves were to be separated from their mother. Silverhair wondered if these Lost knew how cruel that separation was — indeed, that without her mother’s milk Sunfire would soon surely die.
Croptail was still calling. But there was a Lost beside the calves’ cage. He had a goad, which he flicked cruelly through the bars of the cage, snapping at Croptail’s flank.
Silverhair rumbled threateningly.
The Lost looked at her — an unrestrained adult mammoth — and decided not to whip the trapped calf again.
Silverhair approached Foxeye’s cage. Foxeye was standing with her great head bowed, beaten and subdued, her coat filthy. She was burdened by heavy chains that looped around her neck and feet, fixed to stakes rammed into the muddy ground. Silverhair reached through the bars of the cage, and wrapped her trunk around Foxeye’s.
At first Foxeye’s trunk was limp. But then, slowly, it tightened.
"I promised I’d save you," said Silverhair. "And here I am."
"We thought you were dead," Foxeye said, almost inaudibly.
"You were almost right," said Silverhair dryly. "But we’re still alive."
"For now," said Foxeye dully.
Deliberately, slowly, still trying not to alarm the Lost with their thunder-sticks, Silverhair turned and wrapped her trunk around the stakes that bound her sister’s chains. The stakes were fixed only loosely in the ground, and were easy to tug free of the mud.
"Help me, Foxeye."
"I can’t…"
"You can. For the calves. Come on…"
With their sensitive trunk-fingers, the sisters explored the cage. Silverhair found twists of thick wire; the wire was easy to manipulate, and when it was gone, the front of the cage fell away into the mud.
At first Foxeye cowered in the back of her open cage. But then she allowed herself to be led, by Silverhair’s gentle tugs at her trunk, out of the cage.
The Lost seemed surprised by the ability of the mammoths to take the cage apart, and they were arguing, perhaps trying to decide whether to use their thunder-sticks.
Silverhair tugged Foxeye to the calves’ cage. The heavy chains at Foxeye’s neck and legs clanked, trailing in the mud, and as they approached, the Lost who had goaded Croptail ran off.
The calves were not chained up, and Silverhair and Foxeye simply lifted the cage up and off them. Croptail and Sunfire rushed to their mother; Sunfire immediately found a teat to suckle.
Silverhair made sure she threw the cage impressively far before letting it crash to the mud. It collapsed with a clatter of metal, sending more of the Lost fleeing.
She nudged Foxeye. "Come on. We can’t wait here."
Croptail poked his head out from under his mother’s belly hair. "What’s the plan, Silverhair?"
No plan, she thought. I’m no Lop-ear… "We’re just going to walk right out of here. Don’t be afraid."
She turned and faced the Lost. She looked around at their empty faces, their skinny bodies, their dangling jaws. She had the impression that these were not truly evil creatures — at least, not all of them. Just — Lost.
"Listen to me," she said. "Perhaps you can understand some of what I say. I am not going to permit you to take my Family away from their home. And if you try to stop us, I promise you, your families will have to perform many Rememberings."
But the Lost merely stared at her trumpeting, foot-stamping and rumbling, as if it weren’t a language at all.
She turned back to her Family. "Go," she said. "You first, Croptail. That way — out to the tundra. We won’t go through the City again. We’ll make for the shore."
"Then what?" demanded Croptail.
"Just do as I say."
Bemused, frightened, Croptail obeyed. Soon the little group of mammoths was gliding slowly toward the empty tundra.
As they walked steadily, Silverhair stared at the decrepit buildings, the rows of silent, staring Lost. "This is a hellish place," she said.
"Yes," said Foxeye. "I’ve been watching them. I think they want to turn the whole Earth into a gigantic City like this. Soon there will be nothing living but the Lost and the rodents that scurry for their scraps…"
She told Silverhair how the mammoths had been brought here.
After their capture in the ice chasm, they had been brought back to the beach and bound up tightly with ropes and chains. Harnesses had been fixed around them, and they had been attached to the light-bird with its whirling wings — and, one by one, lifted into the sky.
"Mammoths aren’t meant to fly, sister," said Foxeye, and Silverhair could hear the dread in her voice. "The Lost were taken away too. I think the ones who attacked us — Skin-of-Ice and the others — had been somehow stranded on the Island. The light-birds came for them when the storms cleared from the Mainland."
"What do the Lost intend now?"
"They don’t seem to want to kill us. Not right away. They have plenty to eat here, Silverhair; they don’t need our flesh, nor our bones to burn…"
"There was rope fixed to your cage."
"Yes. I think they were going to move us again. Fly us. Perhaps take us far from the tundra. Somewhere where there are many, many Lost, more Lost than all the mammoths who ever lived. And they would come and see us in our cages, and hit us with sticks, for they were never, ever going to let us out of there again."
"Foxeye—"
"I’d have given up my calves," Foxeye blurted. "If I could have spoken to the Lost, if I thought they would have spared me, I’d have given up the calves. There: what do you think of me now?"